Monday, 30 November 2015

Charles Cooke looks at Trump and those ephemeral thousands of 9/11-celebrating New Jersey Muslims:

This affair serves as the perfect illustration of the ugly manner in which the Trump phenomenon now works. That there is no evidence of “thousands” of American Muslims cheering 9/11 from New Jersey is, frankly, immaterial. Why? Well, because Trump is playing a character on TV, and his script includes no room for error. By the rules he has set out for himself, whatever Trump says he is, he must be. As such, he can’t possibly have misremembered what happened after 9/11 — as might any human being — because he has the World’s Greatest Memory, and the guy with the World’s Greatest Memory doesn’t misremember.

This rule applies consistently. If Trump says he’s a conservative – despite holding positions that usually make conservatives shriek – then he’s a conservative. If that requires redefining conservatism, so be it. If he says he wasn’t mocking a journalist whom he was quite obviously mocking, then he wasn’t mocking that journalist. If that requires his admirers to suspend disbelief beyond all possible limits, then so be it. And if he says that he saw something of which there really is no evidence, then he must have seen it. Worse still: If you like him, then you must have seen it too.

In this late stage, Trump’s whole campaign has become a ghastly feedback loop from which there is no hope of escape. Typically, we do not accept “why wouldn’t it have happened?” as much of an argument for anything. Customarily, we would privilege the ancient principle of ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat (the burden of proof is on the one who declares, not on one who denies) above an appeal to the mob. Not here, though. There’s a SuperTrump to prop up. If 2+2 has to equal 5 to annoy Chuck Todd or to stick one in the eye of the politically correct, then 2+2 is 5.

As secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton opened her office to dozens of influential Democratic party fundraisers, former Clinton administration and campaign loyalists, and corporate donors to her family’s global charity, according to State Department calendars obtained by The Associated Press.

The woman who would become a 2016 presidential candidate met or spoke by phone with nearly 100 corporate executives and long-time Clinton political and charity donors during her four years at the State Department between 2009 and 2013, records show.

Those formally scheduled meetings involved heads of companies and organizations that pursued business or private interests with the Obama administration, including with the State Department while Clinton was in charge.

The AP found no evidence of legal or ethical conflicts in Clinton’s meetings in its examination of 1,294 pages from the calendars.

Sunday, 29 November 2015

Here is the actual truth of what occurred – Trump invited 100 black pastors to meet with him. Apparently he did not tell them that by accepting the invitation they were agreeing to endorse him. Not even all 100 agreed to come – some did, with an aim towards talking to Trump about some of his rhetoric and encouraging him to calm down a bit. The end result was that instead of a meeting of 100 black pastors who endorsed Trump is that there were significantly less than 100 black pastors who met with Trump, most of whom actively opposed him.

One had this to say:

Bishop Corletta Vaughn, Senior Pastor of The Holy Ghost Cathedral and a star of the Oxygen reality series “Preachers of Detroit,” said she was invited to the meeting but will not attend nor endorse Trump.

“Trump is an insult and embarrassment. But he represents the country we have become,” she said Wednesday on Facebook. “ZERO experience ... Flaunting a ticket of unbridled bigotry, sexism, racism and everything that is wrong with America.”

It doesn’t mean what it used to, but the endorsement of the once-Manchester now-New Hampshire Union Leader a few weeks before the state’s primary still means something. It has endorsed Chris Christie. To borrow two football metaphors, this may be construed as either a Hail Mary pass—Christie lags in the polls nationally—or as a punt—the paper can’t make a choice among the more likely candidates. The latter is unlikely, as no love was shown towards Christie’s foes:

We don’t need another fast-talking, well-meaning freshman U.S. senator trying to run the government. We are still seeing the disastrous effects of the last such choice.

Not wasting ink on separate attacks on Cruz and Rubio, such thrifty New Englanders.

Other candidates have gained public and media attention by speaking bluntly. But it’s important when you are telling it like it is to actually know what you are talking about.

That’s the word that describes the condition, arthrogryposis, that reporter Serge Kovaleski suffers from, and which causes his hands to hang at an odd angle. So he was born with it and already suffered from it when he met Donald Trump a dozen times in the last quarter century, including the ones documented here.

It’s also the word William Safire used to describe Hillary!’s lying, and which we must now use to describe Trump’s, after his denials that he knew Kovaleski and was mocking his disability with his gestures.

The Air Force has hired civilian defense contractors to fly MQ-9 Reaper drones to help track suspected militants and other targets in global hot spots, a previously undisclosed expansion in the privatization of once-exclusively military functions.

For the first time, civilian pilots and crews now operate what the Air Force calls “combat air patrols,” daily round-the-clock flights above areas of military operations to provide video and collect other sensitive intelligence.

Contractors control two Reaper patrols a day, but the Air Force plans to expand that to 10 a day by 2019. Each patrol involves up to four drones.

Civilians are not allowed to pinpoint targets with lasers or fire missiles. They operate only Reapers that provide intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, known as ISR, said Air Force Gen. Herbert “Hawk” Carlisle, head of Air Combat Command.

“There are limitations on it,” he said. The contractors “are not combatants.”

Friday, 27 November 2015

It’s the 21st century and Europe is meant to be an open, enlightened continent, and yet a man has just been sentenced to jail — actual jail — for something that he said. Will there be uproar? It’s unlikely. For the man is Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, the French comedian, and what he says — that Jews are scoundrels and the Holocaust is a fiction — is deeply unpleasant. Yet if we’re serious about freedom of speech, if we are truly committed to ensuring everyone has the liberty to think and say whatever they please, then the jailing of Dieudonné should outrage us as much as the attempts to shut down Charlie Hebdo or the jailing of a Saudi blogger for ridiculing religious belief. We should be saying ‘Je Suis Dieudonné’.

[...]

In all these cases, Dieudonné has been punished simply for thinking and saying certain things. This is thought-policing. It’s a PC, spat-and-polished version of the Inquisition, which was likewise in the business of raining punishment upon those who said things the authorities considered wicked. To fine or imprison people for expressing their beliefs is always a scandal, regardless of whether we like or hate their beliefs. Dieudonné really believes the Holocaust is a myth, as much as a Christian fundamentalist believes that people who have gay sex will go to hell or American liberals believe Hillary Clinton will make a good president. He is wrong, massively, poisonously so; but then, so are those Christians about gays and those liberals about Hillary. If every person who says wrong, malicious or stupid things were carted off to jail, Europe’s streets would be emptied overnight.